Al-Qaeda’s Child Soldiers
Frank Crimi in FrontPage Al-Qaeda’s longstanding use of children to wage jihad was on display in a recent video showing boys as young as five training with assault rifles and handguns at a terrorist training camp. The video of the gun-toting, prepubescent jihadists was reportedly filmed by the al-Qaeda-linked East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) at one of the terror group’s training camps in Pakistan’s North Waziristan region. Since 1990 the ETIM, which has been fighting to create an independent Islamic state in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region, has not only committed more than 200 acts of worldwide terrorism but has trained scores of jihadists to fight alongside al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Like father like son, many of the young boys in the ETIM camp were reportedly orphans of slain al-Qaeda fighters coerced by their malevolent elders into carrying on their families’ jihadi business. It should be noted that the use of child combatants is a worldwide plague practiced by a wide array of government, militant, insurgent and terrorist forces. In fact, it is estimated that most of the 300,000 boys and
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